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Preprint of COVID vaccine study blocked by FDA
▲ 65 r/slatestarcodex

Preprint of COVID vaccine study blocked by FDA

Recently, the FDA blocked the publication of multiple vaccine studies, including two that had already been accepted by journals, one of which is available online.

In the Pipeline coverage

New York Times coverage

The FDA claims "the studies were withdrawn because drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data," without further detail available. I am not aware of any evidence of serious scientific issues with the available studies.

medrxiv.org
u/HedonicEscalator — 1 day ago
▲ 10 r/slatestarcodex

Exciting news on pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC, most common pancreatic cancer) treatment:

  • Phase 1 results for personalized mRNA vaccine autogene cevumeran: 9/16 patients overall (56%), or 7/8 (87.5%) responders and 2/8 (25%) non-responders, survived 6-years post-surgery. Overall 5-year post-surgery survival rate is around 20%.
  • Phase 3 results for small molecule ras inhibitor (!!!) daraxonrasib: doubled survival time in metastatic PDAC patients, 6.7 months to 13.2 months (p < 0.0001).

Autogene cevumeran used the small neural network NetMHCpan to assist in neoantigen selection, a key step in manufacturing each vaccine. This is a tiny network with a single hidden layer and barely a triple-digit neuron count, not a giant stack of transformers. As I discussed in previous writing on AI & mRNA, deep learning is a useful specialized tool, but most of the computational pipeline uses traditional techniques.

I don't believe the development of daraxonrasib involved deep learning, based on the paper, but the company behind it recently made a deal with AI drug discovery platform Iambic Therapeutics. It's fair to say that AI-driven drug discovery is a promising idea still in the early stages of development.

More detailed information on LessWrong.

u/HedonicEscalator — 17 days ago